Islamist Militants Blamed for Deadly College Attack in Nigeria

Adam Nossiter ("The New York Times," February 25, 2014)

LAGOS, Nigeria — After herding the female students into a classroom, Islamist militants from the group Boko Haram fatally burned or shot dozens of male students in an attack late Monday on a state college in northeastern Nigeria, officials said on Tuesday. It was the fourth school assault attributed to the group in less than a year.

The assailants, who have vilified public education as blasphemous, then burned down dormitories and other buildings and shot at anyone trying to escape. None of the women were reported to have been harmed.

Abdulla Bego, a spokesman for the governor of Yobe State, where the attacks took place, said the killers had traveled in nine pickup trucks to the attack site, the Federal Government College Buni Yadi, about 45 miles from the state capital, Damaturu. They staged the ambush when soldiers in a military garrison assigned to protect the school were absent.

At least 29 students, ages 16 to 18, died in what looked to be part of a widening campaign by the group. More than 200 people have been fatally shot in the region’s remote villages and towns in the last four weeks in what officials have called a spree of apparently random massacres by members of Boko Haram.

The violence has put the government of President Goodluck Jonathan on the defensive and left the army in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, struggling for a strategy after years of failed counterinsurgency efforts.

The assailants seemed to enjoy unfettered access to the college campus chosen for the latest assault, which stirred outrage among residents in the area. In September, 40 students were killed in a similar assault at a nearby state school.

Boko Haram deliberately targets state educational institutions as part of its Islamist, antisecular campaign.

Mr. Bego said it was unclear why the nearby military post was not staffed at the time of the attack. The army spokesman in Damaturu could not be reached on Tuesday.

After the attackers separated the students, they told the women to read the Quran, go home and find husbands, according to the Yobe State police commissioner, Sanusi Rufai.

The attackers then set about killing the male students, burning alive at least eight, the commissioner said. “Some of them were ready to graduate,” Mr. Bego said. “These are students who were writing their final exams.”

Commissioner Rufai said the assailants “did not touch the female students.”

Much of the Buni Yadi campus was destroyed. “It was a very terrible and gory scene,” said Mr. Bego, who visited the site on Tuesday afternoon. “When you have a school of that scale burned down completely, it is a very horrible sight. Some patches were still on fire. It was really a very gory scene. We were all outraged.”

The death toll could rise, officials said, as some of the students were seriously injured.

A week before the attack, Boko Haram members killed 60 people in the town of Bama in neighboring Borno State; four days before that attack, the militants killed 106 in a mostly Christian village, Izghe; and three weeks before that the Islamists killed 78 in two attacks in the region.

The killings are rarely acknowledged by the group, and the Nigerian government appears helpless to stop them. But the violence is almost certain to increase pressure on Mr. Jonathan, who faces a tough re-election campaign next year. Opposition politicians and the news media have confronted him with questions about his strategy in halting an insurgency now moving into its fifth year.

Hours before the latest attack, the president had assured reporters in Abuja, the capital, that the current strategy was not a total failure. “There have been successes recorded,” the local news media reported him saying, “but the only thing is that it is the negative ones that get noticed.”